I recently completed “The Ram,” pictured below. The model for sheep on the boat was a young ram that came under the care of Aimee León, while she was in the Faroe Islands on her Wool Away Project.

It turns out that this young ram was a good choice for a model–he has since been selected to be one of THE rams. That is a big deal in the Faroes, there aren’t too many rams. Only one or two are chosen from a herd each year. The rest are slaughtered for meat for the year. Aimee León had rescued him out of a vertical rocky crevasse after he broke his leg and carried him back around her neck in her scarf. She became fond of him while caring for him afterwards, and sent his picture when I asked for a sheep model. It turns out that we picked a real stud–This guy will literally make hundreds of babies.

While I was in the Faroe Islands last summer, Matthew Workman of the Faroe Islands Podcast interviewed me. The interview was released last week, as Podcast #197. The interview, along with the 196 other podcasts, is available here:

I was in the studio yesterday, drawing on the key plate for a new piece:

This is based on the Fugloy House painting I did while in the Faroes. So far, both post-Faroe etchings I am working on are based on paintings I did while on my trip. At first, I was worried that I was just copying myself; however, I’ve noticed two things:

The resulting print is much richer for having started out as a painting. Having worked out many of the composition and content issues in the painting, it is easier to explore technical issues more in the etching.

Re-working the image on three copper plates, rather then on paper makes the image evolve a bit, plus it lets me correct side-effects of the initial burst of creativity. The original Fugloy House image started as a seemingly random green blob. The etching version features a closer approximation of the actual Fugloy coastline.

Here is the first proof, from just the key plate (this proof is actually a side effect of transferring the image from the key plate to the other two color plates).